Open AccessSappho, Hegel and Michael Field: Paradox and desire in lyric III
Author(s) -
Mayron Estefan Cantillo Lucuara
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
philologica canariensia
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2386-8635
pISSN - 1136-3169
DOI - 10.20420/phil.can.2021.375
Subject(s) - hegelianism , lyrics , mythology , literature , ideology , appropriation , philosophy , tragedy (event) , ambivalence , perspectivism , field (mathematics) , art , aesthetics , psychoanalysis , epistemology , politics , law , psychology , mathematics , political science , pure mathematics
This article offers a close reading of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s lyric III in Long Ago, a Sapphic volume of verse published in 1889 under the collaborative nom de plume of Michael Field. This collection articulates a dramatic inquiry into the tragedy of unrequited love in a long cycle of lyrics whose third piece most effectively encapsulates the kernel of what the Fields reconstruct as Sappho’s ambivalent eroticism. The outcome of this reconstruction, as analysed in light of lyric III, is a consistent Hegelian view of desire that subsumes a complex system of tropes, myths, paradoxes and imaginative strategies under an overarching ideology of desire as a radical experience of appropriation, violence and self-destruction.